NHS gets poor bill of health

It has not been a good week for the National Health Service or those it treats. Two cancer patients, Paul Richards, 35, and Baljit Singh Sunner, 36, died within hours of each other at Heartlands hospital, Birmingham, after being given five times the normal dose of medication intended to ease the side-effects of their treatment. Richards had been in remission and was thought to be on his way to recovery.

The hospital refused to comment but said that an investigation was under way. Two cancer experts writing in The Lancet Oncology said care for children with the disease was worse in Britain than in other European countries, with survival rates 5% below those of France and Germany. Professor Sir Alan Craft of the Institute for Child Health in Newcastle and Kathy Pritchard-Jones of London’s Royal Marsden hospital said lack of regular health checks meant that some common childhood cancers were not diagnosed until they were advanced and hard to treat. Meanwhile, the British Medical Association said that the disruption caused to hospitals by the government’s new recruitment system could last for months.

A consultant anaesthetist noted that up to 20% of job vacancies in his speciality had not been filled, despite thousands of junior doctors seeking posts. Despite the vast input of funds into the health service, thousands of patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis were told that they would not be allowed treatment with the drug Orencia (abatacept) because of the cost – about £10,000 a year per patient. There was bad news also for Olive Beal, a great-grandmother who is wheelchair-bound and losing her sight, after she applied for a digital hearing aid which would cut background noise. She was told that she would be put on a waiting list of about 18 months. She is 108 years old.

Langham’s career ends in disgrace

Comedy actor Chris Langham was found guilty of downloading child pornography from the internet although he was cleared of the original charge against him of having sex with a 14-year-old girl. Langham admitted downloading the material but pleaded not guilty, claiming he had done so in the process of researching a role for a BBC series which was to feature a sex offender. He also claimed that he had been abused as a child and had felt an affinity with the children being abused rather than any sexual gratification. Langham, 58, admitted to a friendship with the 14-year-old and to having sex with her after she reached the age of 18. She is now 25. Sentencing for the pornography conviction could be custodial. Langham’s career is now effectively over and he has been placed on suicide watch.

Bulldog Brown won’t play poodle

Gordon Brown paid his first visit to Washington as prime minister and pledged Britain would continue to stand alongside the United States, but his body language as he stood next to President George W Bush was far removed from the jovial cameraderie displayed by Tony Blair.

Brown wore a sober buttoned-up business suit instead of jeans. Bush described him, to the bemusement of British reporters, as “not a dour Scot . . . a humorous Scot” and said he was “a principled man who really wants to get something done”. Brown said they had had “full and frank discussions”, diplomatic language for a marked difference of opinion. The Washington Post described him as “more bulldog than poodle”. Brown avoided the phrase “war on terror” and emphasised that Britain’s decision on how long its troops remained in Iraq would be based on advice from the military commanders in Basra, implying it would not be governed by Washington’s wishes.

In a subsequent speech to the United Nations, Brown evoked the memory of John F Kennedy’s call for a global peace corps to face threats to world peace. “If not now, when? If not us, who?” he said, echoing Kennedy’s words. The deployment of a 26,000-strong UN force to the troubled Sudanese region of Darfur was agreed. It is due to be implemented by the end of the year.

Cover-up at the Yard

The report into the shooting dead of an innocent Brazilian by police at Stockwell in London blamed the head of counter-terrorism operations for covering up the fact that the dead man was not a suspect. Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman was accused of “misleading the public” following the death of Jean Charles de Menezes on July 22, 2005. The Independent Police Complaints Commission’s report said Hayman had informed crime reporters that the shot man was not one of those sought for the previous day’s bomb plot, but he withheld that information from a press release he helped to write later.

The report exonerated Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner, saying he had not lied but had been left out of the loop, though it expressed surprise that he had failed to find out the man’s identity. Representatives of the dead man’s family said: “No one has been held responsible for anything. The police have been allowed to get away with murder.”

The TV death that wasn’t

Public confidence in broadcasting was further damaged when ITV was obliged to admit that a cutting-edge controversial documentary had misled viewers as to what they were being shown. In the wake of scandals at the BBC and Channel 4 over rigged or impossible-to-win phone-in competitions which made huge profits from gullible viewers, the revelation embarrassed Michael Grade, ITV’s executive chairman, who had just announced a policy of “zero tolerance” of anything that might appear remotely to deceive the public.

Only days later it was revealed that the documentary Malcolm and Barbara: Love’s Farewell – which had been advertised as showing on screen the moment when an Alzheimer’s patient died – had actually ceased filming three days before he drew his last breath.

The documentary, made by director Paul Watson, generated a media storm for apparently breaking television’s last taboo in filming Malcolm Pointon’s death. It was only when the deceased’s brother said he had in fact died days later that the row changed to focus on the alleged deception. Watson and ITV have since traded allegations as to what was actually claimed and what occurred, but the furore matched that over a BBC trailer which had been re-edited to give the mistaken impression that the Queen had walked out of a photo shoot.

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